Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Adam Kahane
To solve a complex problem, we have to immerse ourselves in and open up to its full complexity. Dynamic complexity requires us to talk not just with experts close to us, but also with people on the periphery. Generative complexity requires that we talk not only about options that worked in the past, but also about ones that are emerging now. And social complexity requires us to talk not just with people who see things the same way we do, but especially with those who see things differently, even those we don’t like.
“Such a desire to be completely clean,” he said, “is like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, where the patient is always washing his hands. It is not healthy to try to keep yourself away from everything unclean in the world.”
deep, dangerous conflict isn’t usually the result of your rational argument versus my rational argument. It’s the result of your rational argument hitting my blind spot, and vice versa. Listening openly helps us defuse this dynamic.”
(“I am not my ideas, and so you and I can reject them without rejecting me”).
If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way that they are, then logically we have no basis at all, zero leverage, for changing the way things are—except from the outside, by persuasion or force.
Psychologically, we defend ourselves by focusing our attention first on what others are doing that is creating the problem situation.
The shock I got from my Bastyr University T Group training was from seeing my own contribution—often unintentional—to
creating the reality that was unfolding...
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If we want to change the systems we are part of—our countries, communities, organizations, and families—we must also see and change ourselves.
“The crisis in our country is so severe,” one of them, Santiago Gallichio, said to me, “that people are willing to try to do things in a different way. We are in an open moment.”
“The options for Argentina are violence or dialogue. You can wait for someone to impose a solution from on high, or you can sit together and work through a solution yourselves.”
Rather than watch and wait and pray for a new president or boss or benefactor who would create a better future for them, they chose to start the work themselves.
When people choose to tell a personal story in such a group, they are revealing something of themselves. They are sharing what matters to them about this problem. Furthermore, because (in Carl Rogers’ paradoxical phrase) “what is most personal is most universal,” these stories also illuminate the source of the group’s shared commitment.
In order to solve tough problems, we need more than shared new ideas. We also need shared commitment. We need a sense of the whole and what it demands of us.
When we talk about ‘solving a problem,’ we imply that we stand apart from the problem and can study it objectively and control it mechanically, with cause producing effect, as we would with a broken-down car.
There is not ‘a’ problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a ‘problem situation’ of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us.
THE WAY TO LISTEN is to stop talking. One reason we cannot hear what others are saying is that their voices are drowned out by our own internal voices. We keep reacting and projecting, judging and prejudging, anticipating and expecting, reloading and drifting off. The biggest challenge of listening is quieting down our internal chatter. When we succeed in doing so, we see the world anew.
Our biggest impediment to hearing is our impulse to talk rather than to listen, to make a judgment rather than an observation.
But we can’t solve tough problems through listening alone—just as we can’t solve them through talking alone. If we want to create new realities, we need to listen and be, but we also need to talk and act. Open listening and open talking are yin and yang, two parts of the same whole, two movements in the same generative dance.
One of these rebuilding initiatives was Visión Guatemala. It was inspired by Mont Fleur and intended to support the implementation of the Peace Accords. Its members were academics, business and nongovernmental organization leaders, former guerrillas and military officers, government officials, human
rights activists, journalists, national and local politicians, clergy, trade unionists, and young people. I was awestruck by this team’s talking and listening and by what, over the years that followed, they produced.
I was worried that we would be so polite that the real issues
would never emerge.
Even a simple listening
exercise—“After lunch, go for a one-hour walk outside with someone you haven’t spoken with yet”—produced excitement and revelation.
We are unaware of the great richness in others. We do not see it. There is a lot, quite a lot, to learn from people who, frankly speaking, one would never have considered as possible sources of learning.
The first way is downloading: saying what we always say and not listening at all. This is what Elena Diez Pinto was worried about when she saw each group sitting separately and thought, “They’re not going to talk with each other. In Guatemala … we say ‘yes’ but we mean ‘no.’” The second way of listening is debating: listening fairly and objectively. This is what the Guatemalan team member was doing when he tried to “actually listen, not to be thinking mentally of how I am going to respond.” Listening openly goes along with talking openly, as when “the young man called us ‘old pessimists.’” The
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The fourth way, generative dialogue, was the listening that surrounded Ochaeta’s talking—like John Milton’s open left hand cupping his loosely clenched right fist. The team sensed that something important and special happened during the storytelling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. Time seemed to slow down: I wasn’t sure how long the “five minutes” of silence actually lasted. The normal separation between people seemed to lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other’s individual perspectives to being, for a
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When the team had listened to Ochaeta, we were not listening with empathy towards him as an individual. He was, in fact, a peripheral member of the team. The story was not about him and he told it with little emotion. Several other people in the room could have told similar stories from their own experiences. Instead, Ochaeta’s talking was a vehicle on which that critically important story entered the room and was heard by the whole team.
Quantum physicist David Bohm once said that the universe is whole but we mistakenly see it as fragmented, as if we are looking in a cracked mirror. In that moment of generative dialogue, the Visión Guatemala team saw the whole.
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future,
We’ve come to believe that the core capacity needed for accessing the field of the future is presence. We first thought of presence as being fully conscious and aware in the present moment. Then we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. We came to see the importance of letting go of old identities
and the need to control . . . Ultimately, we came to see all aspects of presence as leading to a state of “letting come,” of consciously par...
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“We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed, and then we decided.”
How can you get started? Here are ten suggestions: 1. Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are talking and listening. Notice your own assumptions, reactions, contractions, anxieties, prejudices, and projections. 2. Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting. 3. Remember that you don’t know the truth about anything. When you think that you are absolutely certain about the way things are, add “in my opinion” to your sentence. Don’t take yourself too seriously. 4. Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in the system. Seek out people who have
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5. Reflect on your own role in the system. Examine how what you are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are. 6. Listen with empathy. Look at the system through the eyes of the other. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the other. 7. Listen to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all of you. Listen to what is emerging in the system as a whole. Listen with your heart. Speak from your heart. 8. Stop talking. Camp out beside the questions and let answers come to you. 9. Relax and be fully present. Open up your mind and heart and will. Open
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your relationships with others, with yourself, and with the world...
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nearly every group I have worked with has articulated one scenario in which vested interests replay the status quo over and over, in a downward spiral, and another scenario in which a broad, dialogic coalition creates a better reality for all.
In 1998, a journalist asked Czech president Vaclav Havel if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the war in Bosnia. “I am not optimistic,” Havel replied, “because I do not believe that everything will turn out well. And I am not pessimistic, because I do not believe that everything will turn out badly. I have hope. Hope is as important as life itself. Without hope we will never reach our dreams.”
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Capra, Fritjof, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
CompassionateListeningTrain-ing: An Exploratory Sourcebook about Conflict Transformation.
Isaacs, William, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
Jaworski, Joseph, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996.
Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala, 1987.
Sampson, Anthony, Mandela: An Authorized Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Scharmer, Claus Otto, Brian Arthur, Jonathon Day, Joseph Jaworski, Michael Jung, Ikujiro Nonaka, and Peter Senge, “Illuminating the Blind Spot.” Leader to Leader (spring 2002): 11–14.
Senge, Peter, Claus Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future. Cambridge: Society for Organizational Learning, 2004.
van der Heijden, Kees, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. West Sussex: John Wiley, 1996.
